4 Economics and Business eBooks

Charles Robertson, Yvonne Mhango, "The Fastest Billion: The Story Behind Africa's Economic Revolution"
Human Investment Management: Raise the Level by Capitalising Human by Prabhakaran Paleri
Ma Theory and the Creative Management of Innovation By Mitsuru Kodama
A Disaggregate Freight Transport Model for Germany by Sascha Reiche

Charles Robertson, Yvonne Mhango, "The Fastest Billion: The Story Behind Africa's Economic Revolution"
ISBN: 0957420307 | 2012 | EPUB | 272 pages | 7 MB
From the vantage point of many in the West, Africa remains a continent of woe - a place stalked by ethnic conflict, corrupt dictatorships, religious strife, war and famine.
But today, at last, the flawed mythology that treats Africa as a homogenous disaster area is being challenged by investors, economists, fund managers and academics. Age is not often associated with speed; but Africa, the cradle of civilisation, now has more of the world’s fastest-growing economies than any other. After a generation of relative stagnation in the late 20th Century, many in Africa have begun the long-awaited period of catch-up with the developed world. The bottom billion is becoming the fastest billion.
This book, the work of a group of African economists and highly respected analysts from Renaissance Capital, the leading emerging markets investment bank, aims to accelerate the world’s realisation that Africa has no intention of allowing the coming decades to add up to an “Asian Century”. Africa’s day has arrived

Human Investment Management: Raise the Level by Capitalising Human by Prabhakaran Paleri
2017 | ISBN: 9811060223 | English | 302 pages | PDF | 3 MB
This book presents a thought-provoking case for looking at human resource management from an entirely different perspective. In the modern world, organizations have to optimally manage resources to achieve the best results, and the best way to do this is to identify humans as instruments of investment and not as resources. Humans use resources in an activity. Managing people, as a subject, was first studied as part of personnel management, and became known as human resource management (HRM) in the early 80s. However, the basic principles remained largely unchanged. The book argues that it is time that HRM is replaced by human investment management (HIM), where the entire approach of employee management in an organization shifts gears to human investment in activities. In this approach no human is considered bad in relation to an organization, if selected appropriately, and trained well. Everyone is productive, though the returns may differ. Humans can be invested in areas where they are best or can be trained to be the best according to various factors. Unlike any other investment instruments, humans’ value can be continuously upgraded for higher returns. Thus the core of HIM is to maximize the return from each employee as an individual or as a member of the group with minimum expenditure and effort in him or her. HIM can therefore reengineer and replace HRM slowly and steadily at the desired pace where maximum attention is paid to employee investment for improved results. This is unlike HRM, which primarily focuses on employee relations. Turning around HRM to HIM will be the first step in inclusively aligning strategic human resource management with the overall human management. As such, HIM should be seen as a process by which the asset or capital value of individual humans can be increased by turning them into capital humans, an entirely different outlook from the oft-used term human capital.

Ma Theory and the Creative Management of Innovation By Mitsuru Kodama
English | PDF,EPUB | 2017 | 304 Pages | ISBN : 1137593547 | 4.72 MB
This book focuses on the core theoretical concept of “Ma thinking” - an idea that serves as springboard for the thoughts and actions of distinguished practitioners, innovators, and researchers.
The theoretical and practical importance of the Ma concept in new innovation activities lies in the thinking and activities of the leading practitioners. However, there is little academic research clarifying these characteristic dynamic transition mechanisms and the synthesis of diverse paradoxes through recursive activities between formal and informal organizations to achieve integration of dissimilar knowledge.

A Disaggregate Freight Transport Model for Germany by Sascha Reiche
2017 | ISBN: 365819152X | English | 375 pages | PDF | 6 MB
Sascha Reiche develops a multi-modal commodity class specific freight model at the level of firms for the area of Germany that allows integration of macroscopic as well as disaggregate input data. Three modes of transport and 30 types of goods at the spatial level of 403 national and 29 international regions are considered, taking into account supply chain specifications of 88 different German business branches. The goal of this model is to provide fundamental insights into domestic freight transport organisations which should prove useful to decision makers with reference to the subject.